Better This Way
by TolkienScholar
Summary: "The raptors aren't the only family you're ever going to have, Owen." Karen cast a significant look at Claire, and Owen felt himself blush. "A real family—a human family—takes commitment, too."
1. Prologue: Suspended

**Fulfills Caesar's Challenge: Level One, Prompt 12: Family.**

 **Disclaimer:** ** _Jurassic World_** **is the property of Colin Trevorrow, etc., and based on the world create by Michael Crichton. No copyright infringement is intended.**

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A deafening silence dropped over the square. It was the silence of a theater after the curtain has fallen and the music has stopped, before the audience has let out its breath. Life seemed suspended between the unreality of what had happened and the impossibility of the fact that it was over. The antagonist was gone, dragged into the depths of the Mosasaurus enclosure by a _deus ex machina_ that would never have been acceptable in fiction. They always did say truth was stranger.

Two players, however, were still on the stage. Owen watched, fearful for a moment that Rexy might decide to turn on Blue—or them—now that the bigger enemy was gone. But the two dinosaurs only stood there looking at each other, not communicating exactly, not like the raptors and the Indominus had, but still somehow understanding one another. Then the Tyrannosaurus turned away toward the park, and Blue—

Blue stopped. She turned her magnificent head, and Owen saw the streams of blood running down her neck. The alpha male instinct kicked in, that instinct he hadn't known he had until he'd connected with these creatures: the urge to protect and care for her. But as she met his eyes, he stopped himself short.

 _It's her choice,_ he told himself. _She can survive those wounds without your help. You've failed as her alpha. You could have fought Hoskins on bringing them into this, but you didn't. Those wounds are because of you. Her sisters are dead because of you. And if she wants to come back and trust you anyway, then it's her choice._

Owen's lips pursed, but he didn't whistle. He wasn't going to command her anymore. He felt Claire's hand slide into his and was grateful for her support, but he never took his eyes off Blue.

Slowly, the raptor swung her head around and followed Rexy into the trees.

At long last, the audience let out its breath.


	2. Chapter 1: Finished

Gray broke the tension first, letting out a whoop of sheer relief. Zach and Claire both gave sighs that turned into giggles and then laughter. Owen felt Claire's lips on his for the briefest of moments; then Gray dragged her and Zach into a group embrace.

Owen was walking away before they had a chance to invite him in. That was their family, their pack, and they were safe now. But Owen's duties to his pack weren't finished. Blue had made her choice, and he would not—he would _not_ —wish her back, however much it tore at him. Charlie was dead; he had seen her body mangled by cannon fire. Delta and Echo, he was not yet sure of. They were still his responsibility until there was no hope left for them.

He found Delta first, or at least, what was left of her. The Indominus had tossed her onto the grill of an open-air pit, left unattended in the wake of the pterosaur attack, and the grill had instantly flamed up and consumed her. What little remained of her body was burned and blackened. Owen forced his eyes away. There was nothing he could do here.

A noise, weak and painful, drew his attention to a spot along the outer wall of the main building. Owen ran and dropped to his knees beside Echo, just beyond the reach of her teeth. She snapped at him without much conviction; one leg was twisted up horribly under her, and blood was oozing from beneath her where her crushed ribs had broken through the skin. One side of her head had been bashed in.

Owen held out a hand and slowly moved toward her. "Easy, Echo. Steady, girl. You know me; you know I wouldn't hurt you." He was conscious of the lie even as he said it, though he hadn't meant it to be one. He had ordered her to attack a monster ten times her size. Intentional or not, she was hurt, and the fault was no one's but his own.

Owen brought his hand closer until it hovered a hair's breadth away from her muzzle, then gently touched her. She didn't stir. His hand moved to her harness and unlatched it, as he had done for Blue. The straps slipped off onto the ground and quickly became soaked with blood.

"There, that's better," Owen whispered, though pain clawed at his heart. "You don't need that anymore. You never did. That's just the problem: we were trying to control what was never meant to be controlled." He cast his eyes over the wreckage and the trees beyond. "Well, I suppose this place belongs to you guys now."

Echo made a noise that could only be described as a whimper. Owen turned back to her and began to rub his hand over her muzzle and along her crooked jaw, broken by Blue a long time ago in the fight that had secured Blue's status as beta. It had never healed properly.

"Owen?"

He lifted his head. "Claire."

She made as if to move toward him, but Owen shook his head and gestured to Echo. "She may be dying, but she's still dangerous."

Claire nodded. "Owen, I'm sorry, but we need to get the boys out of here. They're holding up all right for the moment, but they're exhausted, and I'm just waiting for one of them to collapse. They've been through a lot, and they're just kids after all."

Owen looked up at her. She'd been through a lot, too, and through it all she'd been stronger than he'd known a woman could be. She was bound to collapse at some point herself—they all were, even he, if he was honest with himself. Claire was right: it was time to go back.

"All right," Owen said. He sighed. Going back was going to be easy. What he was about to do, his last job as alpha of the raptor pack, wasn't. He stood and unslung his gun.

"Owen?" Claire asked, her eyes anxious.

"I have to," Owen answered. "She's going to die anyway. Best case scenario, she suffers for hours till she finally bleeds out. Worst case scenario, scavengers find her before that happens and tear her to pieces." He put the gun to his shoulder. "It's better this way."

Claire nodded and put a hand on his arm. He shrugged her off.

"I have to do this."

Then everything stopped. It was as though he had lost control of the muscles in his trigger finger. Owen knew it would be better to make it quick—better for Echo, better for him—and yet he couldn't seem to pull the trigger. He heard gravel crunching and knew the boys had come up behind them, but still he could not move. Echo's eyes watched him, helpless and betrayed— _She knows what I'm doing to her._

He felt the pressure of Claire's hand on his arm again. This time he didn't shrug her off; he drew on her strength, knowing she needed him to be strong and act. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. Far worse than to see Echo die would be to miss and have to shoot her again. No, the first shot had to be lethal.

Slowly, deliberately, Owen squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp crack, and Echo's body went limp. She never made a sound; her death had been instantaneous.

Owen slung the gun back over his shoulder. An urge had come over him to fling it away, but his reason won out before he could act on it; they were not off the island yet. Echo's body represented the end of his raptor pack, but Claire and the boys might still need protection.

Claire slipped her arms around him and rubbed his back. "I'm sorry you had to do that," she whispered.

"I'm not sure if I could have done it without you," he said into her hair.

The hug didn't last nearly long enough. "Let's go," Claire said, pulling gently away. "Let's get out of here."

Owen nodded. Claire beckoned to the boys, and they set off for the ferry dock, Claire leading and Owen watchfully bringing up the rear. As they walked, Gray fell into step with Owen and slid his hand into his.

"You're really brave, Owen," he said.

Owen smiled. "You too, kid. You too."


	3. Chapter 2: What Had to Happen

Questions. So many questions, and not even different questions, but the same questions over, and over, and over, because apparently lawyers and officials were above communicating directly with one another, though no one seemed actually capable of doing anything.

 _"Yes, as far as we know the enclosure itself was safe."_

 _"No, Control did not authorize the paddock watchman to open that door."_

 _"Yes, the attractions were evacuated as soon as it was recognized they were in danger."_

 _"No, of course none of this was intentional!"_

He and Claire were shunted from one authority to the next—he lost track somewhere around the eighth—and at each stop Owen could see the dollar signs piling up. There were a lot of lawsuit-happy people in this world.

They were currently in a hangar in Costa Rica along with the other survivors. Zach and Gray were there with their parents, who had made their emotional arrival around eight o'clock in the morning. Claire had offered for him to stay back with them too, but he'd told Claire they should stick together, "for survival." The offer had turned out to be irrelevant anyway; with Hoskins dead, Owen was needed to give information on the raptors' part in the whole fiasco. Again and again he watched Charlie's, Delta's, and Echo's deaths, and Blue's leaving, in his mind's eye, until he was sure he had given more details of the events than he actually remembered.

Then they were back with the Mitchells, and Claire was forcing something on him that smelled delicious but tasted like sand in his mouth. The boys had both fallen asleep, Gray in his mother's lap and Zach on his father's shoulder.

"Owen? Come on, please eat."

He shoved Claire's hands away. "I'm not hungry."

Her brow furrowed in a way that made him wonder if she was going to cry. "Do you have any idea how long it's been since you've eaten? You need to get something in you." She grimaced at the food in her hands, which his brain finally registered as tacos. "I'm not a fan of airport Taco Bell either—I've totally ruined my diet—but at least it's food."

Owen shook his head.

Sighing, Claire tossed the uneaten tacos back into the bag. She sat down on the bench beside him and began to rub his shoulder. "Is it the raptors?" she asked.

He nodded. He felt guilty, grieving so much over them when he should have just been glad he and Claire and the boys had made it out safely. But every time he pictured Echo's agonized, betrayed face, his stomach clenched and he felt ready to throw up.

"They were very brave, Owen," Claire said softly. "They saved our lives. And—Owen, you did what you had to do."

"I failed them," he returned. "All four of them. Hoskins's threat was empty, you know; he said it was happening with or without me, but it wouldn't have. One of his lackeys might've gotten mauled a little, they'd have realized it was impossible without the trainer, and then…" He trailed off, unsure what would have happened then.

Claire echoed his thoughts. "And then what? What else could we have done? Your raptors saved lives, Owen."

"They took lives, too. Hoskins—sorry, but good riddance—but there were others. Good men. I don't know what we would have done, but it would have been better for all concerned if I hadn't given in."

Claire sighed and ran her tongue over her lips. "Or, we would have been out of options, and all of us—Hoskins and his lackeys, Lowery, Barry, the boys, me, you—we all would have died. And the raptors, including Blue—"

"The Indominus wouldn't have killed the raptors unless they attacked her first."

"Owen!"

Owen looked at Claire in bewilderment. Her face showed shock, betrayal, confusion— _She looks like Echo, the moment she realized I was about to shoot her._ The realization made him cold, though he wasn't sure what he'd done to make Claire look at him that way. "What?"

Her voice was slow and hesitant, as though she were carefully sorting out the words she was going to say. "Do you—Do you really wish that we had all died and the raptors had lived?"

A hot wave of shame swept over him as her words sank in, and he turned and pulled her into his arms. "No, Claire," he whispered. "No, I didn't mean that, I didn't mean that at all…"

He felt hot tears soaking into his shirt as Claire's shoulders began to shake. The breakdown had had to come eventually. He rubbed her back, stroked her hair, held her as she cried and shook. Once, he met her sister Karen's eyes and saw there a strange mix of emotions, as though she felt she should be the one comforting Claire and was at the same time glad he was doing it. He felt self-conscious under her gaze; she'd heard everything he'd just said, and the more he thought about it, the more he was horrified by the implications. He was just following the argument to its natural conclusion, but that conclusion was every bit as awful as Claire had said it was. Maybe she was right: maybe what had happened was what had to happen.

 _And is it better this way?_ he asked himself. He looked down at Claire, sobbing in his arms; at Zach, slumped against his father's shoulder, finally able to let his guard down after the long hours of looking after his brother; at Gray, sweetly and innocently asleep in his mother's lap.

 _Yes,_ he answered himself. _Yes, it is._


	4. Chapter 3: Commitment

Owen held Claire for a while after the sobs subsided, so long in fact that he began to wonder if she'd fallen asleep against his chest. Just as the thought crossed his mind, however, she sat up and began awkwardly trying to straighten her hair and her jacket.

"I'm sorry," she said stiffly. "I don't know what came over me."

He caught her hands and held them still. "I do. The tension, the adrenaline—you were bound to crash at some point." He looked down, mumbling, "Plus I said something really stupid."

She squeezed his hands.

"I didn't mean it the way it sounded," he continued, knowing he was about to start rambling and not sure if he cared. "But I've been the alpha male of that pack for three years, and you do get into that mentality… The pack means family, and family means you look out for each other. You've seen them pick on each other, and the whole rivalry between Blue and E-Echo—" He swallowed hard. "But it's just normal sibling rivalry, and, you know, nobody gets to pick on your siblings except you. And the alpha—protection of the pack is his job more than anyone else's. I give the orders, so I take responsibility for what happens. And if what I order hurts, _kills_ members of the pack…" He trailed off into a strange, high-pitched laugh. "I'm a human who thinks he's a raptor. I should probably get my head checked out; there's got to be some sort of psychological condition that falls under."

Claire smiled and shook her head. "There is. It's called dedication, or in some circles, commitment It happens to be a psychological condition I'm really attracted to."

One corner of Owen's mouth turned up at that. After a moment, he added, "Yeah, but commitment's not much good after you've already made the mistake. It just makes the consequences hurt a lot more."

"Which is why it is some good even after you make the mistake," Karen's soft voice broke in from the other side of Claire.

They both turned to her.

"What?" Claire asked.

"It's the pain of the consequences that keeps you from making the mistake again," her sister explained. "If you didn't care enough to be hurt by the consequences, you wouldn't care enough to learn from the mistake."

"But he didn't _make_ a mistake," Claire said sharply. "He did what he had to, to save us."

"He let someone bully him into putting his family at risk against his better judgment," Karen went on in a soft tone. "If it were a human family, you'd have a problem with it, too, Claire. It's only for the best because instead of humans, they were dinosaurs. But from one perspective, from the perspective of Owen as the alpha raptor, there's no difference. Is that accurate, Owen?"

Claire had been frantically making negative signals at her sister, mouthing what looked like "not helping." But Owen had found himself nodding as Karen spoke. She had said in a few sentences what he'd been trying and failing to express to Claire. There was something oddly cleansing in hearing his feelings of guilt defined with such clarity.

"She's right," he said. "From your perspective, it wasn't a mistake because it got you and me and the boys out alive, and from that perspective, you're right. And ultimately—" He swallowed. "Ultimately that's where I'm going to stand. But I can't just forget the other perspective, Claire. You may want me to, but I can't."

"And you shouldn't," said Karen. "You need to remember so that when the choice comes again, you'll remember to put family first."

Owen let out a long sigh. "Except that I messed up so badly this time, there won't be a next time."

Karen shook her head gently, giving him a tender smile. "The raptors aren't the only family you're ever going to have, Owen." She cast a significant look at Claire, and Owen felt himself blush. "A real family—a human family—takes commitment, too. More commitment than you'll have ever given to anyone, animal or person, in your entire life." She ran her hand through Gray's curly hair and then turned her eyes slowly, even shyly, toward her husband Scott.

Scott was looking at Karen, tears standing in his eyes. Claire slid her hand into Owen's as the husband and wife leaned over the heads of their sleeping sons and shared an awkward kiss. Claire turned to him, her face radiating joy.

And that was when Owen realized: He had already found a new family.


End file.
